Why Hillary Clinton spoke out on Obama

Hillary Clinton has taken her furthest, most public step away yet from President Barack Obama, rejecting the core of his self-described foreign policy doctrine and describing his decision against backing Syrian rebels early on as a “failure.”

She also stood unequivocally with Israel in its current battle with Hamas in a lengthy, detailed interview on foreign policy with The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg, which was conducted last week prior to the president’s authorization of airstrikes against Islamist militants in Iraq. The interview was published late Saturday.

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Obama’s foreign policy doctrine as a whole has been slammed as too slow to respond, too passive instead of proactive, especially as crises have unfolded everywhere from Ukraine to the Gaza Strip. In the interview, Clinton, who served as secretary of state during Obama’s first term, argues there’s a balance that can be struck between muscularity and isolationism — bolstering the concept of American exceptionalism, which she promotes in her new book, “Hard Choices.”

A source familiar with the interview said Clinton’s team gave the White House a warning that it had taken place. Clinton aides described the interview as one intended to promote her memoir, and Goldberg as a long-planned-for target on a list of interviews around the book — and not part of an overarching political strategy related to 2016.

Political watchers will be tempted to characterize Clinton’s comments as calibrating away from an unpopular president as she looks toward a second presidential campaign. But Clinton has always been more of a hawk than Obama, and she has reached a point where she seems comfortable explaining their differences. Still, while her comments may not have been a specific effort to escape the creeping shadow of global chaos stretching over the White House, they will be viewed that way.

“I guess she is ready to begin to rip the Clinton franchise away from the Obama franchise,” said Steve Clemons, an Atlantic foreign policy blogger. “This is a staggeringly important interview and, in many ways, is going to reawaken the substantial resistance to her as a reckless interventionist by some quarters. … Her comments on Syria are very provocative.”

One Democratic operative who asked not to be identified said the clear takeaway from the interview was simply that Clinton advisers are “good poll readers,” a reference to Obama’s sinking public approval ratings. A Clinton adviser replied, “That’s ridiculous,” stressing she has no polling operation.

Syria, where the civil war has contributed to the current conflict in Iraq, was on track to become a clear flash point between Clinton and Obama before she even left the administration, and it remains one area where the two are obviously still divided.

In his own interview with New York Times columnist Tom Friedman, published this weekend, Obama reiterated his belief — which he also stated in a separate interview with Goldberg two months ago — that early arming of Syrian rebels in that conflict was a “fantasy” because it would mean arming an opposition made up of “former doctors, farmers, pharmacists and so forth” who had little chance against Syrian President Bashar Assad’s forces.

But Clinton never agreed with this view, and still doesn’t.

“The failure to help build up a credible fighting force of the people who were the originators of the protests against Assad — there were Islamists, there were secularists, there was everything in the middle — the failure to do that left a big vacuum, which the jihadists have now filled,” Clinton said.

Obama’s approval ratings have sunk, and the string of second-term foreign crises appears endless, from Russian-backed rebels’ alleged downing of a civilian plane in Ukraine to the rise of the militants of the so-called Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, who are threatening America’s Kurdish allies in Iraq. Clinton’s approval ratings are higher than Obama’s, but a recent POLITICO poll showed they, too, have suffered as Republican critics continue to go after her over the 2012 attacks on the U.S. mission in Benghazi, Libya, and amid the myriad crises abroad.

Obama, who ran for president promising to get the U.S. out of Iraq and now finds himself engaged there again, has been slammed by his critics as too slow to embrace the display of American power abroad. Clinton’s aides, meanwhile, insist that she is simply being more candid about her views now than the canned version of herself in her 2008 presidential campaign. In any case, a more visible separation from Obama was, as Goldberg himself notes, only a matter of time.

On the West Wing’s self-described foreign policy doctrine — “Don’t do stupid s—t,” or “Don’t do stupid stuff” — Clinton was blunt.

“Great nations need organizing principles, and ‘Don’t do stupid stuff’ is not an organizing principle,” she said. “… I think [Obama] was trying to communicate to the American people that he’s not going to do something crazy. I’ve sat in too many rooms with the president. He’s thoughtful, he’s incredibly smart, and able to analyze a lot of different factors that are all moving at the same time. I think he is cautious because he knows what he inherited, both the two wars and the economic front, and he has expended a lot of capital and energy trying to pull us out of the hole we’re in.”

She added, “I think that that’s a political message. It’s not his worldview, if that makes sense to you.”

The interview was with a columnist who is widely seen as the preeminent voice of the moderate-right foreign policy establishment, and one who has focused extensively on the Middle East and Israel. It was slotted two weeks ago for early the following week, meaning two weeks before Obama made an announcement authorizing airstrikes in Iraq.

Clinton did not denounce the president and took pains to praise him at times, noting the difficulty and complexity of the crises he faces.

She made it clear, for instance, that she “advocated” for arming the Syrian rebels but acknowledged there was no way to know with absolute certainty whether it would have made a difference.

“I did believe, which is why I advocated this, that if we were to carefully vet, train, and equip early on a core group of the developing Free Syrian Army, we would, number one, have some better insight into what was going on on the ground,” she said.

“Two, we would have been helped in standing up a credible political opposition, which would prove to be very difficult, because there was this constant struggle between what was largely an exile group outside of Syria trying to claim to be the political opposition, and the people on the ground, primarily those doing the fighting and dying, who rejected that, and we were never able to bridge that. … So I did think that eventually, and I said this at the time, in a conflict like this, the hard men with the guns are going to be the more likely actors in any political transition than those on the outside just talking. And therefore we needed to figure out how we could support them on the ground, better equip them, and we didn’t have to go all the way, and I totally understand the cautions that we had to contend with, but we’ll never know. And I don’t think we can claim to know.”

The topic of Syria has been fraught between the Clintons and Obama for much of the last 18 months. At a closed-press event for Sen. John McCain’s institute last year, as POLITICO first reported, Bill Clinton, in a question-and-answer session with the senator, said that Obama should act more forcefully to help the Syrian rebels and that any president risked looking like a “total fool” if they learned the wrong lessons from public opinion polls.

With Goldberg, Hillary Clinton pushed back when asked whether Obama could be accused of “underreaching” in his foreign policy approach.

“You know, I don’t think you can draw that conclusion,” she said. “It’s a very key question. How do you calibrate, that’s the key issue. I think we have learned a lot during this period, but then how to apply it going forward will still take a lot of calibration and balancing.”